Imposter Syndrome: Chapter 3, Part 2
Imposter Syndrome: Chapter 3, Part 2
Vampires and Whatnot.
Imposter Syndrome is my fourth novel. It’s a spooky young adult mystery set in the weird town of Shady Springs, where nothing’s ever quite what it seems. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing serialised instalments of the story exclusively on Substack. If you like it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support my fiction writing. Annual subscribers will get a free physical copy of the novel when it’s published in full.
Previously…
Tiffany lifted her sunglasses and narrowed her eyes. “Where’ve you two been?”
Theo watched as the invisible string on Alex’s back tugged again. Her face broke into a broad, easy grin. “Town.”
“Obviously. Where else could you possibly go?”
It’d taken them almost half an hour to cycle back to the Oakwood house. The return journey was mostly uphill and Theo was sweating right through his t-shirt by the time they pulled into the drive.
Tiffany had been there, lounging in a deck chair with her feet propped up on the porch handrail. She had earbuds in and didn’t hear them mount the steps. Alex poked her in the shoulder and she almost jumped out of her skin, and now she was in a bad mood.
“Seriously, where were you?” she muttered, reaching for a tumbler of iced tea by her chair. “Mom said you’d be back by twelve.”
“What time is it now?” said Theo. He didn’t wear a watch and his phone was still in the den. When was the last time he’d gone somewhere without it?
“Nearly one,” said Tiffany. “Mom’ll be mad.”
“It’s not our fault,” Alex replied, her easy grin fading. “We got held up.”
“Oh yeah? Why?”
“Well, we were going to Mr Morgenstein’s house, and - ”
“ - and we stopped by the comic book store,” Theo cut in quickly. Alex frowned, but he continued: “Fintan told us to say hi from him.”
Tiffany made a face. “Ugh, Fintan. I don’t want to hear any more.”
She waved her hand dismissively. Theo pushed Alex towards the door, eager to get inside before she revealed too much.
“Nice bike, by the way,” Tiffany called.
Theo shut the door behind them and sighed, relieved to be out of the sun. The hall was cool and dark.
“Why’d you interrupt me?” said Alex, prying off her left sneaker with the toe of her right one.
Theo started to do the same without thinking. “You were going to tell her,” he said.
“Was not.”
“You totally were. And then she’d have told your parents, and they’d have told the police or something.”
Alex worked her right sneaker off. “We’ll have to tell an adult eventually.”
“Tiffany probably doesn’t count as an adult,” said Theo, “but she’d still get us in trouble.”
“Alex! Theo!”
Speaking of trouble…
Aunt Noelle stuck her head around the kitchen door. “What happened to ‘back by noon’?”
“Sorry, Mom,” said Alex sheepishly.
“Sorry, Aunt Noelle,” Theo echoed.
“Did you deliver those strawberries to Mr Morgenstein?”
“Yes,” Alex said. “Well, actually - ”
Theo nudged her ankle with his toe. Aunt Noelle didn’t notice and disappeared back into the kitchen, calling “Come and get lunch” over her shoulder.
“Quit interrupting me!” Alex snap-whispered.
“Quit always telling the truth!” Theo replied.
They followed Aunt Noelle into the kitchen, where the table was still set for lunch. Right on cue, Theo’s stomach started gurgling at the sight (and smell) of fresh-baked bread, sliced swiss cheese, honey-roasted ham and fat, juicy tomatoes. A slab of yellow butter, impaled with a knife like King Arthur’s sword in the stone, rested next to a big bowl of potato chips. Theo went straight to the table, reaching for a tall jug of cloudy lemonade.
“Have you washed your hands?” Aunt Noelle said, her back to them as she wiped the counter. Theo sighed and joined Alex at the sink.
Hands scrubbed clean, they flopped gratefully into chairs by the table and tucked into lunch. Theo was hungrier than he’d realized and quickly polished off three sandwiches stacked with fillings, followed by a double handful of salted potato chips and an enormous chocolate chip cookie. Alex watched in amazement as he drained his tumbler of lemonade for the second time and sank back in his chair.
“How do you eat so much?” she said.
“Don’t know,” said Theo, fighting the urge to burp - Aunt Noelle still seemed miffed and he didn’t want to push her over the edge. “I was hungry, I guess.”
“Your mother doesn’t feed you enough,” Aunt Noelle commented, dipping another plate into the soapy sink water. “Growing boys need their food.”
“Please tell her that,” Theo said.
Aunt Noelle chuckled. Alex swallowed the last of her lemonade, leaned in and whispered, “Let’s go.”
“Why? Oh, right.”
“Thanks for lunch, Mom!” Alex said cheerily, pushing back her chair.
“Thanks, Aunt Noelle,” Theo echoed again.
“You’ll be back on time tomorrow, now that you know what you’re getting,” Aunt Noelle replied. She threw them a wink and went back to the dishes.
They were back in Alex’s room thirty seconds later. As Alex went to her desk to retrieve the binder, Theo decided it was finally safe to let out the burp he’d been holding in downstairs. It came out much louder than he’d expected.
“Eeww!” Alex cried, disgusted. “This is my bedroom!”
Theo grinned, patting his stomach. “Better out than in, right?”
“I heard that,” Tiffany called from downstairs. “You’re gross, Theodore.”
“I know,” he called back.
Alex had the binder in her hands. She looked from it to him, like it was buried treasure they’d just dug from the ground.
“Ok, let’s see it,” Theo said.
Alex hesitated, glancing at the open door. “Not here,” she said.
They hurried back downstairs. Alex kept the binder tucked under one arm - as though that was actually enough to hide it - but Aunt Noelle was gone and no-one noticed them leave. They went out the back door to avoid Tiffany (wherever she was now) and into the garden, where they paused just long enough to remove their socks and stuff them into their pockets. The lawn was lush and cool under their bare feet. Theo took his time, curling his toes in the thick green grass, no longer bothered by the hot midday sun above them.
A single oak tree sat sentinel-like in the far corner of the garden, its branches swaying gently in the breeze. Alex nestled into a groove between two thick roots and placed the binder on the grass in front of her. Theo plonked himself down beside her, grateful to be in the shade.
“Nice spot,” he said, looking through the Oakwoods’ picket fence towards Shady Springs forest in the distance.
“I come here a lot,” Alex replied, opening the binder. “It’s a good place to read.”
Theo turned his nose up at the word “read” and looked at the binder by Alex’s knees. She quickly turned the first page, smoothing out the next two.
“Wait, what did that say?” Theo said. He reached for the binder and Alex smacked his hand away. “Ow!”
“Nothing,” she said, pink creeping into her cheeks. “It doesn’t matter. Shut up.”
“Did that say The Alex Files?”
She hesitated. “Yes. So?”
Theo laughed, loud enough to send a bird fluttering from the branches above them, just like at Mr Morgenstein’s house. Alex’s face went from pink to red and she slammed the binder closed. “Ok, we’re done.”
“No, no,” Theo said, laughing himself out. “I’m just being dumb. It’s a good name.”
Alex folded her arms. “You are being dumb, and you’re just saying that.”
“I’m tired and full of food,” Theo said, “I’ll laugh at anything right now. Come on, let’s see it.”
Alex considered for a moment, then opened the binder. Theo caught a glimpse of the title again, written in sparkly green glitter-gel, and then Alex was turning the pages.
“This one,” she said, pointing at a newspaper cutout, “is about the grocery store on Spring Boulevard. The one I showed you earlier.”
Theo thought back. “The vampire coven?”
“Yup. The Shady Springs Gazette - that’s our local newspaper - did an interview with the manager there after a car crashed outside it one night. The driver hit a lamppost, and the lamppost fell right across the street. The top of it hit a fire hydrant and set it off. Glass, electricity, water. It was a whole big thing.”
“Right.”
Alex put her finger on a highlighted section of the text. “It was what the driver said, though, that made it weird. He crashed because he got distracted by someone going up the fire escape on the building opposite the store. But look - you can see it in that photo, in the background. Notice anything?”
Theo squinted at the grainy, monochrome image. He could see the building behind the driver, who must have been talking to a reporter at the time. It took him a moment to get it. “The ladder’s up.”
“All the way,” Alex said, nodding eagerly. “The driver said someone was going up the fire escape, but it would’ve been impossible. No-one could’ve reached that ladder, no way. And he said they were going fast, so fast they were just a dark blur, almost like a shadow. But he swears he saw someone.”
“So… it was a vampire?” Theo said dubiously.
Alex was still nodding. “From the store. I’ll bet it was out hunting, and that driver stumbled across it by accident. He was lucky he crashed, otherwise it might’ve gotten him. And the store manager did his best to, you know, play it down and stuff. But he sure sounded like he was lying.”
She pointed at another highlighted section but Theo’s eyes had already gone to the next page. “What’s this?” he said, peeling back a curled page stuck into the file.
“Oh,” said Alex, “that’s one I wrote about. The poltergeist in the library.”
“The what?”
Alex grinned, reading her own words scrawled in pencil. “A poltergeist. You know - a ghost. There’s one in Shady Springs library, on the second floor.”
“There is? How do you know?”
“Right here,” she said, tapping the glued-in page. “I wrote this straight after talking to someone who’d seen it. Well, not seen it, but seen what it did. His name’s Tommy O’Brien and he’s a year younger than me. He was in the library one night when - ”
“Hang on,” said Theo, holding up his hand. “He was in the library one night? How was he in there at night, exactly? Do libraries open then?”
“Ours does, once a week,” replied Alex, matter-of-factly. “I think they do it so more people will come in and read books.”
“And do they?”
“No. Most don’t, anyway. But Tommy did, one night in October last year. He went there with his older brother - his name’s Jarred, he was studying for finals - and he was on the second floor by himself when it happened.”
Theo swallowed. “What happened?”
Alex tapped the paper again. “Read it. Out loud.”
Theo sighed and shifted closer to the binder, peering down at Alex’s writing. Somewhere high above them, a crow cawed in the sky.
“Tommy was upstairs in the library,” he read, while Alex listened. “His brother was supposed to be studying down below, but Tommy said he was really there to meet a girl. Tommy was bored. He’d gone to the second floor to look at graphic novels. There was no-one else up there. He was standing by the shelves looking through a book when the room suddenly got really cold.” Theo shifted on the grass; Alex stared at the leaves above them. “He said the skin on his neck went all goosebumpy. He looked around but no-one else was there, but he thought he heard a noise, like someone breathing slowly. He started to get a little freaked out and was about to leave when… a book dropped from the shelf next to him.”
Theo glanced up at Alex, but she continued gazing at the branches above them. The crow cawed again. Theo licked his lips and read on: “Tommy said he didn’t move for ages, just stared at the book lying on the floor. Finally, he bent down to pick it up. As soon as his fingers touched it, one of the ceiling lights began flickering and the room got even colder. He started shivering and couldn’t stop. But he picked up the book anyway and put it back on the shelf. He said afterwards he didn’t know why he stayed, why he didn’t just run for his life. He started to put his own book back and that’s when other books started falling off the shelves. One hit him on the head. He said it was as if…”
Theo trailed off. Now the skin on the back of his own neck was covered in goosebumps.
“It was as if someone was shoving the books off the shelf from the other side. He didn’t want to look but he did anyway, and there was no-one there. Just the other side of the aisle, empty. Then more books started coming down, faster and faster, some flying right across the aisle he was in, and he ran. The ceiling lights all started flickering on and off. Books shot from the shelves as he ran for the stairs. One caught him beside his eye and there was a cut there the next day. He felt the cold breath on his neck when he reached the stairs and he screamed.
“His brother and the girl he was with met him at the bottom. The librarian came too, waving her hands and shushing him. They all thought he was having a panic attack or something. Tommy told them there was someone upstairs throwing books at him and Jarred went up, even though Tommy begged him not to. He said he was almost crying by then. But when Jarred came back down, he said all the books were on the shelves and the lights weren’t flickering. Everything was normal. Tommy said he was looking at him like he was crazy. But the cut on his face was real and it was still there the next day.”
“Read the last bit,” said Alex, picking at the grass by her knees.
Theo smoothed down the curled edge of the page. “Tommy said the librarian told them off and said they couldn’t come back again without a parent. Jarred was mad about that. He said he’d beat Tommy up if he didn’t pass his finals, but he did, so it was ok. Tommy said Jarred was more worried about not seeing the girl than his school work.
“But what Tommy remembered most was what the librarian did when they were going out the door. He looked back through the glass, just before they left the lobby. He saw her at the bottom of the stairs, looking up to the second floor. And she was waving.”
Theo stared at the words for a moment, chilled to the bone. When he finally looked up, Alex was grinning toothily at him.
“Gnarly, right?” she said.
“That’s… really creepy,” Theo said. He read the last line again and quickly turned the page. “Was he lying, d’you think?”
“Don’t think so,” said Alex. “He showed me the cut on his face. And he was properly scared, too. He told me because we were sort of friends at the time and he knew I was into this stuff, but we don’t talk much anymore.” Her grin went away; she gestured to the binder again. “It’s full of stuff like that. Poltergeists, vampires, gremlins in the traffic lights.”
Theo blinked. Gremlins in the traffic lights.
“I’ve seen some of it myself,” she continued, “but the red lights in the sky… it’s never been that real before. I need to know what’s out there.”
“Why?” Theo said, quicker than he’d meant to. “Why does it matter?”
“Maybe it didn’t so much until today,” Alex said, pulling the binder towards her. “But then we met those boys in Mr Morgenstein’s house and everything they said sort of… confirmed… something’s going on. You know? It hasn’t just been in my head all this time. Something’s happening in Shady Springs. We should find out what it is.”
Theo sighed again and looked towards the distant trees.
“Ok,” he said in a serious tone, “but first, I want cookies. Do you have cookies here?”
“How are you always so hungry?” Alex laughed, closing the binder.
Sick photo!